The Federal Government has launched a virtual teaching programme called Inspire Live, which Education Minister Tunji Alausa says will connect pupils in underserved schools with qualified instructors through live online lessons. The government is touting it as a solution to Nigeria’s chronic teacher shortage. It is a scam.
The plan is fundamentally broken because it ignores the basic reality of the schools it claims to help. Rural schools in Nigeria do not have electricity. They do not have computers or tablets. They do not have projectors. The Minister himself admitted there are connectivity challenges, but he promised that the Nigerian Communications Commission will provide free data. Free data is useless when there is no power to charge a device and no device to charge. You cannot stream a Physics lesson to a village in Zamfara where the students sit on the floor under a tree because the classroom has no roof.
This is a classic Nigerian government scam. The government will budget billions of naira for this initiative. They will award contracts for software development, consultancy fees, and data partnerships. The money will disappear. The contractors will pocket the funds. The politicians will take their cut. No solar panels will reach the villages. No tablets will reach the children. The government will hold a few press conferences, post photos on social media, and then quietly abandon the project when the cameras leave.
Instead of this high-tech illusion, the government should be doing the hard, unglamorous work of fixing education. They should be paying teachers a living wage. They should be building real classrooms with desks and chairs. They should be securing schools from the bandits who keep abducting students. They should be funding public universities properly instead of suffocating TETFund to feed a student loan scheme.
But that would require real effort and real money. It is easier to launch a digital platform that does not work. It is easier to blame the lack of electricity on the rural communities. It is easier to pretend that a virtual teacher on a screen is the same as a real human being who can mentor, discipline, and inspire a child.
The Tinubu administration has spent the last three years telling Nigerians to endure economic hardship. They have underfunded education, refused to pay ASUU their full demands, and allowed out-of-school children to reach 18.5 million. Now, they want to give these children a virtual teacher they can never access.
This is not education reform. This is a money-making venture for the contractors and a public relations stunt for the politicians. The children in underserved schools are being used as props. They are being promised a future that exists only on a screen, while their present remains in the dark. Until the government provides real infrastructure, real teachers, and real accountability, this virtual school is just another empty promise from a government that has run out of ideas.
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